[ExI] Is the brain a digital computer?

[Chris Luebcke]

And as I keep pointing out, if you can't define what a thought is, then statements about its properties are vacuous. You are also interchangeably using the terms 'thought', representing the activity of thinking, with 'thoughts'. Surely you weren't claiming that the activity of thinking has mass, so your response seems to almost willfully misrepresent what I said. 

I believe that the only workable definition of the noun 'a thought' is, fundamentally, 'a statement', which is certainly information, certainly can be held in media other than brains, and certainly does not have mass.

If you have an alternative definition other than the assertion that everybody already knows exactly what you're talking about so you don't really need to say it, I'd love to hear it. Especially if the definition explains how it can have mass.     


On Feb 26, 2010, at 8:15 AM, Gordon Swobe <gts_2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:

--- On Fri, 2/26/10, Christopher Luebcke <cluebcke at yahoo.com> wrote:

...If you pass a high-powered magnet over the hard drive of
my computer, the mass of the hard drive will not change, but the 
information will be destroyed... Christopher

I do not consider information on a hard drive as constitutive of thought, for the same reason that I do not believe newspapers think about the words 
printed on them.

-gts






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